The impermanence of slack as an archive of record bothers me.

Site PMs are also impermanent, my inbox is almost full.

Although significantly less impermanent, since that’s 4 years deep instead of 2 months.

A few concerns:

This potentially makes slack mandatory for people, instead of an optional thing. Someone might miss a private message sent to them on the Slack if they don’t use the slack, and so miss out on “sending a Private Message to both the recipient of the transfer and the Doge which clearly specifies the transferred amount.”

There is also nothing in the rules that requires players to have a slack account which matches their username. This might be something we want to codify under the fair play rules. But I’m not sure we can actually say the “Clucky” user on the slack channel is really the same as the user behind this account? What if Scholasticus joins a dynasty? How can we say for sure that p.scholasticus on the slack channel is Publius Scribonius Scholasticus?

@Clucky, I had thought that might be a concern and had a few ideas for how to mitigate that: One would be making it an option only if sender and recipient have been active on Slack within the last month (maybe hard to figure out in the rare borderline case).

Another would be making it an option only if the alternate method is specified in the user’s site bio (e.g. Josh would have to put something like “I am Josh on Slack, you can PM me there”). It would have the flexibility to not be Slack.

I’ve edited it to be the latter, which I liked more in the first place. It’s hard to word it, but I hope this works.

“any form of contact” I think might run into issues. If you look here:

https://blognomic.com/member/3515

there is no place for you to put your slack username. But also there is an option for emailing you. However not everyone will want people emailing them for blognomic. And many people might have that hooked up to an old email address or a spam folder and never see anything sent their way.

I was imagining the Bio as being the place for a Slack username, homing pigeon coordinates, etc.

also this could technically allow for communication by say, writing a letter to a PO box. Which could create a timing headache. Does the action happen when the letter is written? postmarked? received by the recipient?

new wording is good, but think it would be better to make it opt in and require them to list their slack name.

I like that too. One more edit. Proposal.v2.final.FINAL.doc

I think I still want the formal structure of the BN PM system to be necessary.

hrm. Josh does make a decent point about permanence. Slack could fail if you ever need to archive something more than a couple of months. (but also, you could run out of PM space on blognomic so maybe its no different)

I mean, I think that there is a palpable difference: I haven’t cleaned out my BN PM inbox since the first switch; my oldest PM is “FWD: Scam in the making” from Klisz on 3/21/2009 at 11:21 PM, in which they said

From Wak:

Could you and the other admins please make it so that your username actually cannot be changed? I smell a scam comeing (not from me)....

You could argue that my years away from the game impact that total, and you’d be right, but you’d be no less right to observe that it is conceivable that a long but not record-breakingly long dynasty could exceed the entire archive time on Slack, so that’s not really ideal.

By the by, Clucky, Darknight and Kevan can verify the contents of that PM from twelve hecking years ago, because they received it as well, and I’ll bet folding money that at most one of them has cleared out their BN PM inbox in the intervening more than a decade.

My oldest PM is from Chronos in October 2011 talking about some sort of “Reserve powers” that I guess were like an attempt to further protect the rules from scams?

Technically that is nine and a half months ago so still within the last decade. Poor Josh might lose his lunch money on a technicality =D

Do you think the fact that it is opt in matters at all Josh? You’re still free to only get communications by blognomic message

😩 my millions

Not really? I think PMs are an important part of the record and having a record that stretches to a couple of months at most is just insufficient. That would be most dramatic in a PM-heavy dynasty that went on for three months (which is not an impossible scenario) but even in situations less extreme than that it would, I think, still involve some loss of fidelity to the historical record.

I used the word “record” too many times there.

Profile pages aren’t (and shouldn’t be) gamestate. This definition lets the receiver add or remove their Slack name to cause their direct messages to be, or not be, private messages at any given time. There’s no obvious audit trail, so it can be difficult to sort out whether a particular message was a private message at a past point in time.

Some good points from Bucky

My oldest private message is a coding question from Wakukee in October 2009. (I think we had an inbox size limit in place for a while, before we either realised that we could make it unlimited, or an EE/server update allowed us to do so.)

per Bucky.